Crucial Ballistix 2GB 1600MHz DDR3 Memory Kit Review

R.S.T. Pro PCI Express Stress Testing

How Do We Define Stable Memory?

Have you ever run across a review web site that reviews a product and shows a couple amazing scores and gives it an award? Sure you do as most review sites do just that, but how stable was it? I would be willing to bet that most sites don’t know what stable memory is and therefore give fairly inaccurate results. Yes, I hate to break the news, but there is more than just running a memory bandwidth test and calling memory stable! Ever wonder what some of the memory companies use to test their modules? So did we, and we found out that they use the RAM Stress Test Professional 3 (R.S.T. Pro3). It is a Self-Booting, Operating System Independent memory diagnostic card for exercising and validating RAM. The R.S.T. Pro PCI Express’s powerful memory package is small in program size allowing the firmware to load itself into the least amount of memory possible. This allows for true low-level testing of RAM starting at memory address 2k exercising the complete range of a computer’s RAM. There are many good approaches for testing memory. However, many tests simply throw various patterns at memory without much thought or knowledge of memory architecture. Ultra-X is able to continuously develop new sophisticated proprietary memory test algorithms to locate the most evasive memory failures. R.S.T. Pro PCI Express has the broadest range of algorithms, for current and future memory chip technologies and this is why Legit Reviews has used R.S.T. Pro testers for nearly five years now to test our review samples.

By using the R.S.T. Pro PCI Express memory tester we are able to find memory errors that other testing methods could not find or reproduce. Since we want and encourage our readers to follow up our testing on their own, we suggest using free testing programs at home. We highly suggest a program called Memtest86 which is a stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers that boots off a floppy disk. This software was getting old was unable to run on all platforms, so we will stick to the RST Pro2 for the time being. In recent years Chris Brady and some of the guys over at x86-secret have come up with Memtest86+, which is an updated version of the original program and it still happens to be free.

We considered the memory stable when it was able to run 1 extended pass of Memtest86+ and a full loop of testing on the R.S.T. Pro PCI Express. If any errors are found using the R.S.T. Pro PCI Express then the memory modules have failed memory stress testing.

By this combination of tests we feel that this review is one of the most accurate completed in terms of memory stability. Sure, not everyone will agree with our stability testing methods, but not everyone can afford the cost of a memory tester like this nor the time that went into this testing.

Bottom Line:

There is no industry standard for professional reviewers, but hopefully reviews like this will cause other professional reviewers to change their methods and ways of looking at memory.

Results:

The R.S.T. Pro PCI Express memory tester was run on the Crucial DDR3 PC3-12800 2GB Memory Kit and tested the Base/Extended memory. After 5 loops no errors were found! Memtest86 was used and confirmed these results.